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Charles Landow features topics ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in this week’s Missing Pieces. As always, enjoy the reading and let us know what you think.
I recently caught up with Jordan Kassalow, a former CFR colleague who founded the non-profit VisionSpring nearly a decade ago. Kassalow, an optometrist by training, recognized that one of the great opportunities to improve economic productivity in the developing world is by getting simple reading glasses—the kind you can buy off the shelf at any drugstore in America—into the hands of the working poor, those earning less than $2 a day. Some 560 million people around the world are visually impaired yet have no access to eyeglasses. More than 70 percent of them just need the mass-produced, non-prescription type. The majority of the visually impaired are middle-aged laborers—the economic backbones of their communities, raising children and supporting elderly parents at the same time. As their vision blurs with age, they lose their livelihoods, which hurts their families and their communities. A recent study by the University of Michigan confirmed Jordan’s hypothesis: once workers have eyeglasses to improve near vision, their productivity rises by 35 percent and their incomes rise by 20 percent—a gain that can last for twenty years.
This post marks the launch of a new feature on Democracy in Development, Missing Pieces. Each Friday Charles Landow, associate director of CFR’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, will highlight several noteworthy or intriguing events and articles that you may have missed during the week. Each entry will include a principal link, context or commentary, and related materials. I hope you enjoy the selection, and I look forward to your comments and contributions on the topics Charley selects. Enjoy!
Late last week reports emerged that the United States was canceling or suspending some $800 million in aid to the Pakistani military. Relations between the two countries have been extremely tense since the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May. But this is only the latest rough patch in a partnership long dogged by concerns that Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment is playing a double game—accepting American support and promising to fight terrorism while maintaining links with groups responsible for attacks. Clearly the Obama administration is trying to send Pakistan’s generals a message by withholding some of the money and equipment they want.
The case for reducing U.S. aid to the Pakistani security establishment is compelling, and it keeps becoming more so. Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI, has been linked to the horrific killing in late May of Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist who reported on Islamic militancy. A Human Rights Watch statement chronicles threats Shahzad said he received from the ISI, and it reports that he “was in intelligence agency custody” after disappearing from Islamabad on May 29. His body was found shortly after with “17 lacerated wounds delivered by a blunt instrument, a ruptured liver, and two broken ribs,” according to a New York Times article. Last week Adm. Mike Mullen, the top American military officer, suggested that he believed Pakistan’s government signed off on Shahzad’s death. “I have not seen anything to disabuse the report that the government knew about this,” he said. Read more »
The Financial Times recently published a fascinating article by Abeer Allam about how Saudi clerics are embracing social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While some of the early adopters of social media, not surprisingly, were liberal clerics, it is now the conservatives who are coming on strong.
One well-known conservative, Sheikh Youssef al-Ahmed, has nearly 16,000 followers. Sheikh Ahmed uses his online presence to rail against anything in Saudi society that smacks of reform. He gets particularly agitated by attempts to break down the Kingdom’s strict system of gender segregation. (In an apparently unrelated development, reports came in over the weekend that Sheikh Ahmed was arrested for denouncing the Kingdom’s lengthy detentions without trial of terror suspects. A #freealahmad hashtag soon appeared on Twitter.)
A few years ago, Sheikh Ahmed gained notoriety for harshly denouncing King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) for allowing female students to study alongside men. Despite King Abdullah’s patronage of the university, Sheikh Ahmed deemed it a “source of unbelief” in Saudi Arabia, claimed its president and faculty were nonbelievers, and decried its lack of “religious surveillance.” For this outburst against KAUST, and by extension against King Abdullah, Sheikh Ahmed was fired from his official government position, which might help explain his uptake of social media. With many official outlets for his views now closed, he promotes his conservatism in the free-for-all world of Twitter and Facebook. Last summer, when the government approved the appointment of women as cashiers in several Panda shopping centers, Sheikh Ahmed issued a fatwa against it saying it was “prohibited because it is part of the Western project that is imposing itself upon our society.” He called for a boycott of Panda stores, and the government backed down, removing the women. So much for trying to address the high levels of female unemployment in Saudi Arabia.
The role of a vibrant business community in promoting both economic development and durable democracy is widely acknowledged. But it is less clear how to foster a private sector that can serve as an engine of growth and participate constructively in the democratic process. The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) works on just this question. One of the four “core grantees” of the National Endowment for Democracy, CIPE aims “to strengthen democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform.” The organization helps business associations and other private actors in developing countries with such challenges as improving laws and regulations, bolstering corporate governance, boosting entrepreneurship, and combating corruption. In addition, CIPE works to educate government officials, businesspeople, the media, and the public about “the freedoms, rights, and responsibilities essential to market-oriented democracies.”
Last week my colleague Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy Program, spoke at a conference hosted by CIPE in Washington. Here is Gayle’s readout of the conference and the trends in women’s entrepreneurship, a subject that is also the focus of her book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana.
When it comes to entrepreneurship and the power of economics to change lives, women face both promising opportunities and daunting barriers. Both were in focus at a conference hosted last week by the Center for International Private Enterprise entitled, Democracy that Delivers for Women. Read more »
Isobel Coleman
Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative Subscribe to this blog by RSS |
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For more on what the United States and others can do to foster open, prosperous, and stable societies, visit CSM&D.
In Paradise Beneath Her Feet, Isobel Coleman shows how Muslim women and men are fighting back with progressive interpretations of Islam to support women's rights in a growing movement of Islamic feminism.